


why be brutalized by an uncaring world?

by stuckoncloud9



Series: Batman Forever (and Ever) [1]
Category: Batman (Movies 1989-1997), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Obsession, One-Sided Attraction, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:13:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26976406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stuckoncloud9/pseuds/stuckoncloud9
Summary: Edward Nygma likes computers, simulated reality, and Bruce Wayne (not necessarily in that order).
Relationships: Edward Nygma/Bruce Wayne
Series: Batman Forever (and Ever) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1968679
Comments: 12
Kudos: 36





	why be brutalized by an uncaring world?

**Author's Note:**

> A backstory for the Batman Forever (1995) version of the Riddler. Elements are drawn from the movie's novelization, as well as the character's Post-Crisis comics origin and his debut episode on Batman: The Animated Series.

Edward was thirteen years old the first time he was put in a foster home where the parents had a computer he can use. He knew, from school, that he was good at computers — too good, according to one computer science teacher who had been decidedly unamused by the capricious attempt at a computer virus he’d created for “extra credit.” But there were some things you just couldn’t do in the school’s computer lab, even if you knew how to get to the right websites without alerting the school’s virtue-protecting firewall. 

So, the first time his new foster parents left him in the house unsupervised, Edward rolled up his sleeves, hopped onto the computer, and pirated as many video games as he could in one sitting. He wasn’t sure what he’d like — he’d never played anything other than browser games before — so he pulled together a variety. _Need For Speed_ , the latest _Civilization_ , _Call of Duty: Black Ops_ , a _Tomb Raider,_ some _Star Trek_ parody called _Mass Effect_ , _Bejeweled 3._ He played all of the intermittently; some for days at a time, some for fifteen minutes before he got bored and uninstalled it for the valuable hard drive space. 

His favorite, unexpectedly, wasn’t any of the shooters or RPGs or puzzle games (though he does log several hundred hours of _Bejeweled_ ). _The_ _Sims_ was one of the last games on his list that he tried out. He almost hadn’t downloaded it in the first place; the whole point of this endeavor was to _escape_ from his life, after all, and a 1:1 whitewashed recreation of the dullness of reality seemed like a pretty counter intuitive way to do that. 

But he’d heard online that there was an exploit where you could trick your sims into drowning by putting them in pools and then fencing the perimeter, which seemed like something that could be amusing for an afternoon. And after one _especially_ bad day at school, when an attempt to impress his classmates had gone spectacularly and painfully wrong, Edward decided that he was in the mood for that kind of amusement. 

Apparently “households” in _The Sims_ couldn’t expand past eight members, so Edward did some quick mental math on which of his peers he was most eager to get back at and got to work. He tried to be as accurate in recreating their appearances as possible, though if he had to be completely honest he would acknowledge that his mental image of them might be skewed a _little_ unflatteringly. He gave them all the same five traits — Loser, No sense of humor, Absent-minded, Evil, and Childish. Close enough, he figured.

He placed the household on an empty lot, then built the pool that would be their watery grave. He watched, biting his nails with anticipation, as they filed into the water. Once they were all splashing around and enjoying themselves, he paused the game and hastily constructed a wall blocking them in. When he let time resume, then put it on fast-forward, it took a few minutes for anything to happen. As they swam happily, their energy drained lower and lower until finally one of Edward’s classmates was too tired to swim anymore.

He drowned, flailing with cartoonish drama as he sunk below the water. The sims trapped in the pool with him freaked, and Edward stared at the screen as they tried to get out, failed, freaked out again, and repeated the process until they’d all exhausted themselves into drowning too.

When it was over, and eight matching gravestones were lined up near the surface of the water, Edward was... kind of entertained? The bruises sure hadn’t gone anywhere, and his eyes were still red and puffy from the long walk back to his foster home after missing the bus, but he felt more like laughing now than he had twenty minutes ago. Cautiously optimistic about the rest of his evening, he opened the menu and reloaded the game to before the household’s tragic demise.

He spent some time on the wiki page detailing the different causes of death available, and after a few hours of experimentation he determined that his favorite was electrocution, with a seeping lot-decimating fire as a close second. He created a few new households, when he became bored of his first. One had a few more students but is mostly composed of teachers, who Edward resented a little more for their mistreatment due to their status as adults. One was a collection of all his least favorite caseworkers, and that first court-mandated therapist who’d picked and picked at him until Edward had wanted to scream. Another household was just his father, which his _current_ court-mandated therapist would probably disapprove of, but there was something so satisfying about racking up gravestones for the old man that Edward downloaded the _University Life_ expansion just so he could have access to death by blunt force trauma. 

It’s fun, for the most part, until it causes him to spiral into the kind of frustration and anger he’s supposed to be avoiding. That’s usually his indication that it’s time to close the game for the day and switch to his _other_ route of escapism, which had been keeping him entertained long before he’d had after-school access to computers.

It hadn’t even been a daydream, at first. It had started during his court case, when Edward hadn’t really had the mental space for anything that time-consuming, anyway. But he _had_ spent a considerable amount of that fall watching television in waiting rooms, and the news stations during those three months were even more single-minded than he was. 

The murder of two of the city’s most premier citizens — practically Gotham royalty, the gossiping newscasters all seemed to agree — was not something the news cycle was willing to let go of lightly. Especially not when the couple had left behind a nine year old son; the cherubic, traumatized heir to the biggest fortune in Gotham. 

Honestly, Edward had been jealous. About the money, of course, because the thrift store clothing and bargain bin belongings hadn’t exactly been making his life any _better_. In his less generous moments, especially after realizing his dad wasn’t even fighting to keep _him_ so much as he was just fighting off potential jail time, he was jealous of the entire concept of orphanhood, which seemed like such a cleaner way to lose your parents. More than anything he was jealous of the house. Having his own personal mansion to live in would have been a much more pleasant alternative to being tossed around at the whim of the state. 

Then the funeral happened, and the board of Wayne Enterprises managed to get the whole thing televised, much to the delight of the Gotham media circuit. It was a long string of eulogizing celebrities and politicians, each of whom seemed to have been Martha and Thomas Wayne’s closest personal friend. The crowd was large, the melodrama was off the charts, and Edward could have watched the whole thing with popcorn if he’d had some quarters for the courthouse vending machine. 

And then he’d seen Bruce Wayne. Not a photograph, or some ad of him and his parents waving in front of the Wayne Enterprises logo, but the real thing — live, unscripted, and seemingly unaware there was even a camera pointed in his direction. 

And he looked _miserable._

Edward had seen a lot of unhappiness in his day; he owned a mirror, for one. Or at least he had, until Child Protective Services had pulled him out of his house with whatever he could fit in a backpack. But Edward had never seen anyone so despondent as Bruce Wayne, as he sat in a pew watching the media circus that was his family’s funeral. 

It wasn’t as if he was crying. It would have been a normal situation in which to cry, Edward was pretty sure. But Bruce’s eyes had been dry as he stared out ahead of him. His piercing blue eyes, underlined by bags that a layer of foundation couldn’t really hide, were completely free of tears whenever the coverage switched to the camera aimed at his face. They were just... empty. Angry. And aware — terribly, devastatingly aware of what had happened to him. What was still happening to him. 

Edward had carried that hollow stare with him into the trial that afternoon, and the day after that, and the day after that. He’d watched the news shows that analyzed the funeral of the decade for weeks afterward. _What kind of child doesn’t cry at his parents’ funeral?_ the T.V. personalities asked. _What’s wrong with Bruce Wayne?_

 _Nothing_ , Edward wanted to scream at them. But he kept watching their stupid conversations, because inevitably they would show the clips of Bruce again. And Edward would look into those empty, hollow eyes and think that maybe — just maybe — he had found someone he could actually relate to. 

That was when his collection had started. It had been easiest, then. Any discarded newspaper or waiting room magazine had a picture of Bruce or a story about the Waynes that could be torn out and hidden in his pocket without anyone noticing. He kept them in a manila folder he’d stolen from school, which Edward rarely took out from its concealed spot under his clothes unless he was adding more to it. He wasn’t really sure what to do with them, not at that point; he just knew that he wanted them, and that the people he’d stolen them from hadn’t deserved them anyway. 

By the time that he’d been sent to the home with a computer, the manila folder had long overflowed and been replaced by a scrapbook he’d stolen from one of his older foster moms, who’d already had her own children grow up and move away. Originally he’d just intended to slip his collection into the plastic pages, maybe sorting them chronologically, or by subject matter. But while he’d been pulling out the dozens and dozens of photo collages of the woman’s stupid children, he couldn’t help but feel a little inspired. So instead of throwing the pages away, he just pulled off her photos and the most obnoxious of the stickers and got to work making something that actually justified the leather binding.

It was after a particularly short and emotionally unproductive session of watching those two kids who always made sure to sit behind him on the bus (and poke and prod until he “spazzed out” and the driver yelled at _him_ ) die of hypothermia that he encountered a problem. Earlier that week, when looking for old newspapers to steal at the public library, he’d made the incredibly lucky find of a back issue of _House and Garden_ where Martha Wayne took the reader on a tour of Wayne Manor. He was excited to use it, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted the pictures to be the backgrounds for other collected photos, or if they should have their own dedicated pages with Martha’s quotes about the mansion pasted over them. If he chose the wrong thing, it seemed unlikely he’d ever get another copy to try again.

He was posing one of the rare full body pictures of Bruce on the stairs of the Wayne foyer, trying to decide if the effect looked good or it was too cheesy, when the thought occurred to him that there _was_ something he could do to both cut up the magazine for his own use while simultaneously preserving it.

Returning to the computer, he booted up _The Sims_ while flipping through the magazine. He’d never built anything in the game before — not _really_ , not anything that wasn’t just a death trap, although there was definitely an art to building death traps that Edward had happily mastered. But there was a different kind of satisfaction to the process of carefully, judiciously reconstructing Wayne Manor according to _House and Garden_ ’s photographs and Martha Wayne’s description. 

The project took over a week. He kept having to stop when he got to a part of the floor plan that Martha and the magazine hadn’t covered, and more than half the time, his efforts to find a new reference for the missing piece were fruitless. Edward (at first half-heartedly, then later with enthusiasm) used these holes as places to slip in the secret passages he was sure must be all over a building as old as Wayne Manor.

Eventually, after he’d finally finished all his nit-picky retexturing and fussing with the color palette tool (and added a hidden basement for all the secret passages to lead to), Edward was perfectly satisfied with his creation. He scrolled through the building in live mode, feeling almost like the _House and Garden_ staff that Martha had taken through the mansion all those years ago. He was ready to close the game and finally get around to cutting up the magazine when it occurred to him that he hadn’t really made a _perfect_ recreation of Wayne Manor. 

Because he hadn’t made Bruce.

That was an easy enough fix, though. He’d created a lot of households at this point, and this was one face he knew like the back of his hand. Edward spent a little under an hour recreating Bruce’s appearance in _The Sims_ — the vast majority of which had been spent from the neck upwards, since it only took about six minutes to put together Bruce’s wardrobe. Edward only had one picture of Bruce wearing anything other than a designer suit, and it had been a very easily recreatable black turtleneck. 

When he’d finished, he poured over the lists of traits and eventually selected Charismatic (because he’s SEEN interviews of Bruce, and this is undebatable), Lucky (he knew Bruce would probably object to this, but after spending a week recreating the _actual mansion_ he lived in Edward wasn’t relenting on this point), Family-Oriented (since he seemed pretty torn up about the whole losing them thing), and Brooding (obviously). After much internal debate Edward eventually selected Great Kisser as a fifth trait, since he’d just spent fifteen minutes recreating those lips and this felt less like speculation and more like an objective fact. Scrolling through the possible Lifetime Wishes for the traits he’d chosen, Edward decided on “CEO of Mega Corporation,” since that seemed to be the most likely end result for Bruce in reality. 

For the sake of realism, he also created the British butler who was always standing behind Bruce in photos. His name was Alfred Pennyworth, and Edward didn’t really know anything about him other than that, his job and his country of origin, so he chose the Proper and Neat traits immediately and then randomly picked three others that didn’t seem to contradict the first two. 

He was about to save and place them on the lot, but then thought better of it. He quickly threw together a Martha and Thomas — their appearance and traits didn’t really matter, just their names and the family tree linking them together with Bruce — and then re-entered the game. He paused it immediately, moving the married couple to the hidden basement, locking the door, and setting up a quick house fire.

Within a few minutes, Martha and Thomas were dead. Edward moved their gravestones up to the manor grounds, nestling them in an aesthetically satisfying way under an oak tree he’d placed on the lawn. He knew in real life the Waynes were buried in a mausoleum in Gotham Memorial Cemetery, but this felt more fitting, despite the technical inaccuracy. He bet Bruce would have kept them closer to home if he’d had the choice, anyway. 

He unpaused the game, watching with satisfaction as Bruce wandered over to “Contemplate About the Deceased” and Alfred entered the manor to “Clean House.” He let them play out their little programmed lives for a while; Bruce helping himself to the library, Alfred helping Bruce with his homework, Alfred burning a plate of grilled cheese because he hadn’t yet learned the cooking skill. Then his foster parents came home, and he had to close the game and go to bed. 

He’d had fun, that day. But he couldn’t help but feel like something was missing.

When he got home from school the next afternoon, he’d sat down and reopened Sim creation for the Wayne household. Cautiously, and with much more self-awareness than he was comfortable with, he created a new member of the household under the name “Edward Nashton.”

He spent maybe five minutes on his physical appearance, mostly just making sure his hair and eyes were the right color before moving onto the much more intriguing concept of outfit creation. Real Edward didn’t have much control over his wardrobe, but at this point he’d pirated enough expansion packs that he could create basically any look he wanted, conventionality be damned. By the time he’d finished he had at least ten alternate outfits in every category — most of them in green, _obviously_ , but with splashes of pink and purple thrown in too because he controlled the color palette and he felt like it. 

The traits took practically no time at all. Handy, Computer Whiz, Genius, Ambitious, and Natural Born Performer. He chose Forensic Specialist as a Lifetime Wish without giving it much thought, and was about to save and close out when he remembered something he’d been trying out in his notebooks at school. Paging back to the biographical info, Edward backspaced his father’s name, replacing it with “Nygma.”

And then he pressed play.

That was when it started being a daydream, really. Watching replicant Bruce and Edward run around Wayne Manor, playing chess, doing homework together. Normal life, made infinitely better by the change in company and surroundings. He’d imagined _meeting_ Bruce before, of course. It was impossible not to, with the amount of time he dedicated to curating the other boy’s existence. Edward had even considered writing him, once, but the idea of his own earnest expression of their connection being buried among the meaningless condolences, well-wishes and criticism of the general letter-writing public made him sick to his stomach. It was doubtful that Bruce’s guardian let him read his own mail, anyway, which was probably for the best. There were some real wackjobs out there, after all.

Usually when he thought about meeting Bruce, it was within the context offered by his collection. Bruce didn’t do a lot of public appearances, not since the death of his parents. Paranoia might have been a factor, but Edward guessed that he didn’t much enjoy interacting with the stupid paparazzi philistines, either. Edward could understand; it was almost embarrassing how they obsessed over all the wrong details, projected their own cliched understanding of tragedy over Bruce’s stark reality. Unfortunately, those stupid paparazzi philistines were the only window Edward had into Bruce’s life, so his avoidance of the press really only left Edward with a few charity events to place himself into. 

But Bruce always seemed so _pressed_ at those, all fake smiles and whatever pretty words would benefit the cause he’d thrown himself behind. It was charming, obviously, and one of the reasons Bruce had become somewhat of an idol — Edward had never been able to do that, just _make_ people like him, though he was sure if he watched Bruce for long enough he could put the pieces together. He loved pouring over coverage of Wayne fundraisers, watching Bruce charm the crowds of idiots and disappear before they knew what hit them. But the idea of meeting Bruce at one, so far out of Edward’s element, while Bruce was wearing a mask over his true demeanor...

...It was easier to imagine crashing his parents’ funeral. He’d been so raw then, an open wound that Edward could easily relate to. He had more material from that day anyway, so it was simple to mentally reconstruct. And yet even though he was certain he could have gotten Bruce to open up to him if he were there — that Bruce would see the same thing in him that he’d seen in Bruce — the fantasy fell flat after the service ended. The funeral had already happened; Edward hadn’t been there, would never _have_ been there. Imagining how things could have gone differently left a bitter taste in his mouth. Edward had always preferred dwelling on the future.

And watching this programmed simulation of life in Wayne Manor, Edward could visualize a future worth dwelling on. The daydream came easily while he was sitting in class, waiting impatiently for the bell to ring. It wasn’t complicated: when his current foster parents sent him away — which they would, inevitably — Edward’s social worker would pick him up and drive him to his new residence, not another apartment building but a place past the city limits entirely. 

It was, Edward thought, entirely logical for the Wayne household to take on foster children. The mansion was huge, as he was well aware. It seemed obscene for no one to live there but Bruce and a single butler. Filling the spare rooms with children who shared Bruce’s parentless background (or practically parentless, in Edward’s case) just made sense. Of course, how many other young people were living there upon Edward’s arrival depended on his mood. Sometimes the idea of Bruce bonding with him alone over a whole household of other children was entertainingly fun. Other times, when he was feeling less generous, it seemed more reasonable for Edward to be the first foster child housed at Wayne Manor — and, once Bruce came to enjoy this new status quo, the last. 

The game on his computer often offered less than realistic plot threads for his imagination to pursue. Bruce briefly becoming a vampire, Edward building a robot that fell in love with the butler, Bruce and Edward buying and running a hotel on an island resort — although actually, given the Wayne fortune, that last one might have been within the realm of possibility. But the outlandishness wasn’t the _point_ of the fantasy. He could entertain himself just as easily by spending the afternoon watching the simulations share an Alfred-cooked meal, build snowmen on the manor lawn, or play pranks on unsuspecting neighbors. 

There were flaws, obviously. Simulation Bruce was far more fickle and melancholy than the real thing would be, Edward was sure. And “Genius” or no, simulation Edward was a poor imitation of reality. He had far too many mood swings, required _way_ too much sleep, and at one point even turned down a kiss from Bruce Wayne, which was just unrealistic. He’d replaced the Natural Born Performer trait with Hopeless Romantic to prevent any further instances of the latter, but most of his problems with A.I. Edward were just that: he was artificial. A computer-generated middleman getting in the way of real Edward’s perfect life. 

Still, he missed even that when his foster parents decided to move away from Gotham, taking the computer with them. For a while he considered tracking them down and stealing it back, but the chance that they’d wiped the harddrive or gotten rid of it completely made the risk of running away from his new living situation more trouble than it was worth. 

He managed to acquire his own computer late in high school, built from individual parts he’d put together himself. Some of them had even been bought with money he’d made legally, which was enough of a resume builder that he could put it on his college applications. Between the federal assistance he’d earned through his lack of parental guardians (the only favor he’d ever been done by his worthless father) and the scholarships he’d earned through his high grades and aptitude for standardized tests, Edward graduated to his choice of the best computer science programs in the nation.

Not that it had been much of a choice, in practice; Edward had wasted no time in registering at Gotham University. G.U. had the benefit of offering scholarships funded specifically by the Wayne Foundation, which Edward took particular pleasure in accepting. It was also where Bruce Wayne had spent the last two years taking classes towards his Masters Degree in Business Administration, which made up no little part of Edward’s decision. 

Sure, the “become a foster kid at Wayne Manor” plan hadn’t magically sprung into existence. Why would it? For all the time Edward spent fantasizing about it, he hadn’t done anything to _make_ it happen. There hadn’t been anything he _could_ do, while he was at the mercy of the system (and the board of trustees governing Bruce’s estate until he was legally old enough to make his own decisions regarding things like “who lives in Wayne Manor”). But now Edward was free; of public school, of social workers, of all those completely unnecessary court-mandated therapists. If he wanted to become a part of his idol’s life — which, as his last five therapists had discovered, was not a subject for debate — he could actually work towards making it happen. 

He’d been fantasizing about how their first meeting could go while moving into his dorm, which he’d chosen specifically for its location of being nearly equidistant between the Rossum Computer Sciences Building and the Wayne College of Business. Having his own space that he could decorate in whatever way he wanted was a new phenomenon for Edward, even if it was only half a space, technically speaking. He’d especially never had a chance to make his Bruce collages a permanent fixture of his environment, as the last time he’d attempted to hang one up he came dangerously close to losing his entire collection to the city dump. He’d never understood why his pictures were “creepy” or “gross” or “indicative of greater struggles with emotion processing and self-conception” when the same foster parents had let one of the girls in the house keep an entire wall dedicated to her favorite teen pop idol. 

His roommate seemed to be of a similar perspective, as he’d taken to bringing people from their floor into the room to stare while Edward was decorating. He was perfectly aware of what they were saying behind his back, though he pretended otherwise. It didn’t matter; they’d all see how small-minded they’d been when they saw how much he and Bruce got on. Not that he was planning on ever introducing these philistines to the Wayne heir. He _would_ bring Bruce to the dorm at least once, just to give them a glimpse of what they’d been stupid enough to mock, before moving on to something bigger and better.

He was ready, so ready to put his plan into action. But it was only the third day of classes when he heard that Bruce Wayne had decided to spend the year studying abroad.

The news was disappointing beyond words, and a major blow to Edward’s newfound sense of control over his direction. The numerous and very flattering photographs taken at the airport press conference didn’t mollify Edward in the least (though they took special prominence on his wall, and in his less sullen moments he could acknowledge that they were some of the best in his collection). 

It felt like he’d arrived just too late for the start of his own life. If he’d been just a year older, if he could have met Bruce sooner, they might be traveling Europe together — or, even better, he might have persuaded Bruce not to leave Gotham at all. 

Still, Bruce would be returning to Gotham University at the beginning of the next fall semester. And until then, Edward would be taking full advantage of the world at his feet. From that perspective, it was an opportunity, really; by the time Bruce got back, Edward could have something to impress him with. 

He dedicated himself to his classes; not because he had to, but because he was good at it. His professors, many of whom were too odd themselves to find Edward as exhausting as his previous teachers had, offered praise. Several were willing to provide help and resources for his own projects, most of which were leagues ahead of his coursework. 

But no matter what advice he took or projects he toyed with, he kept coming back to his simulations. He’d never reinstalled _The Sims_ on his homemade computer; too many hours had been sunk into someone else’s hard drive for that world to feel recoverable. Instead he played around with creating his own versions of simulated life. Not graphically impressive, not on the budget of a university student; but coded estimations of a better life that Edward thought had real potential for something better than currently existed on the market. 

It wasn’t perfect yet, but Edward was sure Bruce would be fascinated — _would_ have been fascinated, if he’d come home when he was supposed to. Instead he stayed abroad. Bruce had sent no explanation home in his place, and though Edward consumed the resulting media circus with the appetite of a man starving, the speculation surrounding Bruce’s decision made him feel ill. Bruce was sick and secretly receiving treatment at a pioneering European clinic; he’d met a pretty girl and decided to settle down; he’d never had any interest in returning to the city where his parents had died at all.

Edward found himself in regular mental debates with the imbecilic television personalities, though he clipped the papers carrying their theories regardless. For posterity, he thought; something to laugh over when Bruce was back, and they were wrong. Maybe he and Bruce could read them together, something amusing to entertain them after Bruce explained the real reason for his delayed return.

He’d tried his hand at his own theories, speculating on what tracks of study and intellectual stimulation had captured Bruce beyond what the world had initially expected. Edward was given even more time to do so when his junior year also started with no word of Bruce’s return; the media speculation returned, though less so, and few new theories surfaced for Edward to distract himself by picking apart.

By his senior year there was barely any speculation at all, and at times Edward felt like he was the only person who’d still been waiting. He missed the media circus, as much as it had annoyed him — at least it had been _something_ , a piece of Bruce he could cut out and add to his collection. Now there was nearly nothing. Edward didn’t even know what Bruce looked like anymore; no pictures of the Wayne heir had surfaced in over a year, almost as if he’d dropped off the face of the planet.

Edward felt lonely, in a way he hadn’t had to feel since the day of Martha and Thomas Wayne’s funeral. Around him, his career was taking off. He graduated with honors, with offers from electronic entertainment companies across the globe. He considered trying to choose one that would put him closer to Bruce, wherever that was, but at this point rumors were the only indication of his location — rumors that placed him anywhere across two continents, tabloid claims and blurry pictures that could have been anyone. He never ended up clipping them. The idea of an imposter taking up space in his collection felt wrong. 

Ultimately he decided to take the position offered by Competitron, a software company based out of Star City. It was a work for hire contract for a simulation game still early in pre-development, which wasn’t the most secure or profitable of the options available to him, but by far the most interesting. The game was going to be based around Greek mythology, one of the rare non-computer related subjects Edward had always had fondness for in school. Even more intriguing, the division head Daniel Mockridge claimed the company was interested in trying something new with the game’s mechanics — something that would set it apart from the rest of the market. 

In-person Mockridge proved to be despairingly small-minded, but in his avarice and desire to catch the eye of Competitron’s Board of Trustees he could be relied upon to give Edward free reign to push the envelope of what was possible. Edward’s virtual reality pitch went over well with him, not that Edward had any doubt that it would. It was new, easy to sensationalize, and incredibly expensive to the consumer; everything Mockridge loved in a product. 

The art direction, the animation, all of that Edward left to the rest of the team. His role was in programming the immersion. His goals were lofty — finally he had an opportunity to fully dispense with the middleman, to place the player directly in their fantasy without the stitches and seams of an inadequate avatar. The game’s reactions had to be perfect, had to interpret every action on the part of the player in a way that made people feel they truly belonged in its world.

In his opinion, the end results were far less than perfection. If he had to go back and do it again, he thought a better starting point might have been to focus less on external player behaviors like hand motions or facial expression, and more on what was going on _inside_ of their heads. 

Despite his lack of personal satisfaction with the finished product, _Riddle of the Minotaur_ was an undeniable market success, one that Mockridge was eager to repeat. He wanted to renew Edward’s contract for work on a new game, and despite the inherent unpleasantness of working under the man, Edward was tempted. He was sure he could do it right if he had another chance. He had the blueprint of an idea; a very _sketchy_ blueprint, which would be difficult to pull off, and might come into conflict with some of the federal health and safety standards for electronic entertainment. But he was confident that Mockridge could smooth all that over if he thought the project was profitable. The man’s skill at finding and exploiting loopholes was one of his few redeeming characteristics, depending on which side of the loophole you were standing.

The new contract Mockridge had sent Edward definitely put him on the disfavorable side, which was transparent to Edward even despite his complete lack of legal experience. He’d probably have to hire a lawyer to fix it, which would be inconvenient considering his last contract hadn’t exactly given him access to any of the royalties of _Riddle of the Minotaur._

He was in his apartment pondering the logical insanity of how he could be so smart and still not be rich when a news program playing on his television wiped the matter from his mind entirely. The Star City news anchors were discussing a recent drop in Queen Industries stocks — an unavoidable ripple, they argued, of the economic world’s reaction to the return of Gotham’s favorite prodigal son.

He was grabbing his coat before he’d even fully registered what he’d heard. A trip down to the corner store quickly provided him with issues of newspapers and magazines he hadn’t had the stomach to read in years. He felt guilty for that now, underneath his anxious euphoria over what had to be too good to be true. The last speculation he’d read over Bruce Wayne’s location was a theory that he’d died somewhere in Southeast Asia. He almost couldn’t believe that the man was back in Gotham, exactly where he was supposed to be.

And yet, all the articles confirmed the same facts. Bruce Wayne had returned to the city of his birth two days ago. He had offered reporters no explanation for his extended absence, just informed them that he had returned to fulfill his responsibilities in Gotham. There had been no official announcement as of yet, but it was widely speculated that Bruce would be taking on his father’s previous role of the Wayne Enterprises Chief Executive Officer. A figurehead position, mainly, as in the years since Thomas Wayne’s death all real power had moved to the Board. But the positive reaction even the rumor of the return of a Wayne to the helm had garnered made the move likely.

The Star City publications questioned the logic of the cult-like status that the Wayne family had among Gothamites. Only the Gotham Gazette, for all of Edward’s previous qualms with the paper, captured his exhilaration over his idol’s return. He cut clips from them all, of course; placed them meticulously among boxes of collages he hadn’t opened since he packed up his dorm at Gotham U. The pictures he handled with almost breathless care. Seven years older, Bruce looked every bit the man Edward had imagined he’d be. Tall, muscular — almost bizarrely so, though apparently he’d dedicated a significant amount of his exodus to daredevilry and extreme sports — and with that gleam of intelligence in his eye that couldn’t quite be disguised by the handsomeness of his face or the charm in his smile.

Edward sent the contract back to Mockridge unsigned, with a notice of his decision to seek other employment. He made arrangements to move back to Gotham before his position at Competitron had even officially ended. His ideas for his next project were solidifying in his mind, and he could tell even in this earliest of stages that it would far eclipse his previous. Edward had no desire to share the rewards of his genius with someone as undeserving as Mockridge; there was only one man who deserved to be a full partner in his future endeavors. And when Gotham offered up Wayne Enterprises to Bruce like a rejoicing father serving up a fatted calf, Edward would be there for his portion of the meal.

He’d meet Bruce, at last. And then, when the man understood what he’d been missing out on all these years, Edward Nygma’s life could finally begin.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally this was just supposed to be five paragraphs about Forever Riddler playing the Sims 3, and then it snowballed into this MUCH longer fic because when I started working on it I was also reading the novelization of Batman Forever, which added the detail that Edward had been obsessed with Bruce since the Waynes died when they were children. I thought that raised the interesting question of how Edward would have reacted to Bruce going AWOL for Batman training, and so the fic changed from five paragraphs to over 6,000 words. It IS nice to have a solid Riddler backstory in mind when writing my other fic, so at least I walk out of this with that.
> 
> The title is from a line in Edward's monologue to Bruce upon finally meeting him in the movie proper (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEH5J1fORTE&t=1s), and the obsessive Bruce collaging is inspired by the pure insanity of his apartment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTv3XKiEfxs). Every time I watch it I notice some other insane Bruce-related thing he has pasted on his wall.


End file.
